Unpublishing Link Bubble

Today we are unpublishing Link Bubble from the Google Play Store. To our loyal Link Bubble users, rest assured: if you have installed Link Bubble, you can continue to use it. The code will remain open source, so you can build, customize, and install it if you like. Should we push out updates, everyone who has installed the app from Google Play will receive those updates.

Given Android’s ongoing lack of support for rendering from a background webview, we decided that it was time to move forward and focus fully on our new Android browser app, which is growing very well, and which offers the crucial features that users say they need to deal with today’s Web: tabs; speed; built-in and on-by-default ad-blocking and tracking protection; HTTPS Everywhere; and an optimized data and battery experience.

When we combined Link Bubble with Brave last year, we made it free in price and available as open source software. The result was a great Android app, but we suspected that it would also one day face operating system support problems due to the very nature of its “bubbling.” For this reason, and because many users wanted tabs instead of bubbles, we developed our new tabbed browser app to give users the best Android browsing experience possible.

The plain fact is this: Link Bubble is simply not set up for success in the long run, given Google’s refusal to fix Android to support a webview that runs and renders from a background service (this is how Link Bubble runs in order to float bubbles over your current app). After a number of Android releases with no fixes in sight for significant bugs, we decided it was time to move on.